This subproject seeks to forecast nursing home utilization to examine its determinants. It will develop longitudinal models for the analysis of nursing home utilization, emphasizing the roles of financial status, functional status, and the presence of specific chronic diseases. It will also analyze the interrelationships between hospital utilization, nursing home utilization, and survival. A major focus is the estimation of alternative measures of utilization, including accumulative nursing home utilization (total number of days institutionalized during an interval), the likelihood of nursing home admission, and the distribution of length of stay for the institutionalized population. Utilization will be estimated for the entire population of the elderly as well as for specific demographic subgroups, such as very old widows or the impoverished elderly. Data for the empirical analysis will come form the Longitudinal Study on Aging.